The racial politics of time

This book begins with a fateful and explosive encounter between the author and another shopper in a grocery store parking lot. From that incident, Sharon Patricia Holland takes a hard look at the persisting politics of race and gender, showing us how those battles emerge in everyday contests over time and space. Holland wades into heady academic debates as if exploring the deep nooks and crannies of a cave, and if you take the journey with her, you will find unexpectedly good intellectual treasures that can change the way you think about these matters forever.

Philosopher Charles Mills opens this important essay with the question: "White time — what could that be?" Mills works with the provocative idea that neither space nor time are race neutral. Instead, he brings together the work of sociologists, historians and philosophers to demonstrate how our movements through time and space are themselves shaped by a nagging set of racial politics that continue to impede our ability to achieve an ideally just world.

George Lipsitz argues here, "Aggressive policing takes and wastes time." In particular, Lipsitz enumerates the social and material costs of policing citizens and residents who suffer from housing insecurity. Continually being stopped, questioned, ticketed and dragged into jail or court disrupts the lives of houseless people and robs them of time. This work asks us to confront some ugly truths about which groups of people we see as valuable and whose time and space we view as worthy of protection.

There is a stark difference in life expectancy for those who live in the nation's capital and those born in on its suburban outskirts. This work demonstrates how tethered life expectancy is to one’s zip code and offers a clarion call for us to deal with the myriad challenges of housing insecurity.

Life expectancy in New Orleans can vary by as much as 26 years depending on your zip code. This report outlines many of the social causes that steal time from the city's poorest residents, who are also disproportionately residents of color.